In September 2020 key stakeholders of Adult Social Care Statistics, including Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC), Association of the Directors of Adult Social Services (ADASS), Local Government Association (LGA) and the Care Quality Commission (CQC) endorsed a one-off data collection of adult social care activity in order to provide some insight at local and national level into the potential impact on levels of activity due to the focus of local authorities being prioritised towards dealing with the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.
Normally Official Statistics around adult social care activity are only released on an annual financial year basis, so it was felt that if users of the data were to wait until after the end of 2020-21 this would be far too late to offer any timely insights and furthermore the impact of the initial pandemic period would be unable to be disaggregated.
The data collection was designed to capture a subset of those data items collected on an annual basis, based on user requirements and on known strengths and limitations. The subset was drawn from the following existing collections:
Short and Long Terms Support (SALT): a subset of existing SALT tables capturing key measures including snapshot positions at quarter end.
Safeguarding Adults (SAC): a subset of existing SAC tables capturing number of safeguarding concerns, number of Section 42 and Other Enquiries and number of concluded Section 42 Enquiries split by type of safeguarding risk and location of risk.
Deprivation of Liberty Safeguards (DoLS): number of DoLS applications and completions in the period.
Note: a decision was made not to include any data relating to local authority expenditure on adult social care in this period because the standard annual data collection covering this (Adult Social Care Finance Return (ASC-FR)) is specified on a ‘closure of accounts’ basis at year end and so adapting this for any other point in the year is problematic. However, expenditure information is available from other sources such as the ADASS Budget Survey and MHCLG Quarterly Revenue Outturn Statistics.
Data was requested covering the six month period 01 April 2020 to 30 September 2020. The data is captured at aggregate level, per local authority, and in general covers the whole of the period so it is not possible to break it down further by month. Exceptions to this are SALT tables T33, T37, T38, T39, T41, T42 as these capture the total number of clients receiving social care support on an exact date (30 June 2020 and 30 September 2020)
Data was submitted to NHS Digital by local authorities during the period 19 October to 10 November 2020.
This was a voluntary data collection and local authorities were under no obligation to respond. Nonetheless, the majority did so and the response rate of local authorities that provided data was 81% (123 local authorities out of 151). We would like to thank these local authorities sincerely for this. This can be broken down by the different parts of the collection as follows:
SALT tables: 113 local authorities (75%)
SAC tables: 117 local authorities (77%)
DoLS tables: 122 local authorities (81%)
Of the local authorities that did not respond the main reason given, where one was expressed, was that other demands have taken priority or there was a shortage of available staff.